 Really an honor and a pleasure for me to be here today to host Delphine Schrank with the launch of her book, The Rebel of Rangoon. My name is Juan Ziradi. I'm a senior advisor here at CSIS, really a privilege to be here on behalf of CSIS to welcome Delphine and to congratulate her on her fantastic book. I'm by no stretch an Asia expert nor a Burma expert, so Kaviat's up front, but CSIS is world renowned for its Asia program. Ernie Bauer runs the Southeast Asia program with great expertise. Mike Green, former colleague of mine from the Bush administration, vice president for the Asia program and the Japan chair and then Victor Chaw as you all know, the Korea chair and great expert on Korean and Asian issues, so CSIS has a wonderful expertise in-house and for those who are interested, obviously please check the website, www.csis.org. Just so you're on your best behavior, I know we've been having some drinks tonight. This is being live streamed, so we are being joined by not only Delphine's family, hi Lenny, but also several folks who we know would be joining us online, so what I'll do when we open this up for a broader discussion, we'll ask you to take a mic and identify yourself and that's not only for the purpose of our discussion but for those who are watching online. It really is a pleasure to be here with Delphine. She's a remarkable woman, remarkable journalist and has produced a remarkable book and I'm looking forward to having discussion with her and to hearing from the experts in the space. We're joined by former ambassadors and former experts and those who've been stationed in Burma and so I'm really looking forward to hearing their insights and expertise as well. So welcome Delphine. Thank you very much. Delphine, let me start first because the book does I think some remarkably important things. One deep insights into Burma itself, deep insights into what a resistance movement and democracy movement is and how it takes shape, how it adapts to repression from an authoritarian regime and how this plays out at the micro level as well as the geopolitical level and I have to admit I always have a challenge and a bias of viewing things from a macro geopolitical level and what your book does I think incredibly well is to bring the reality and the human and the cultural dimensions of what is happening in Burma to life and you do it with great narrative expertise. But let me ask you this, what drew you to Burma? Obviously you were the Washington Post Burma correspondent, traveled in and out of Burma over a dozen times, did expert work in reporting in a very repressive environment. But what drew you to Burma and what drew you to write this book? Well, first of all thank you very much for the introduction and thank you for hosting this. I'm really deeply honored to be here and it's true we have some real experts in the room so as I was saying to Ambassador Dinger before, if I have trouble with your questions I'm just going to point them to you. The question of what drew me to Burma, it was completely by accident that I was sent there by the Washington Post and again the person who sent me is also sitting in this room and he happened to have written a book last week which is phenomenal and I'm just going to plug that for a million dollar spy. But I was sent a few days after tropical cyclone Nargis in 2008 and I wasn't meant to be going there repeatedly, I wasn't meant to go there more than once, I was just meant to go and cover the most lethal natural disaster that the world had seen since the Asian tsunami in 2004 and this was a cyclone that hit Burma and hit the rice production region the Irawadi Delta and Rangoon with 105 mile per hour winds, 138,000 people were missing or dead, huge, huge numbers of people and the military junta at the time was dragging its feet not allowing in humanitarian aid, certainly not allowing in foreign journalists they never really had since they had taken power in 1988. So I was sent in really in a mad scramble to just really find out what was going on and get to those storm ravaged zones but the minute I landed in Rangoon I was like we're using Burma and Rangoon. I was just I was so struck by this first of all by this this highly repressive regime in which people really were terribly afraid you can ask direct questions about politics and I knew that but at the same time people if I tried to ask a little bit about the situation of people in the street they would sort of shut up like clans but within a few days I really was struck by something else which is a sort of spirit of dissidence or defiance I wouldn't call it dissidence even just defiance people were angry and quietly angry and finding creative ways to get around the junta to bring help down to survivors of the storm and so that was the first thing that really stuck with me is like in this heart breakingly beautiful land in Rangoon which is decaying and full of colonial architecture and terribly, terribly poor there was clearly something going on that I had also been told wasn't there and Sangsu Chi the great democracy icon of Burma was languishing somewhere in Rangoon under house arrest and I all I knew of Burma was that she was really she was the democracy movement without her there was nothing and all political resistance supposedly was a dead letter and I started to feel that there was something different and it struck a match in me because I'd grown up reading the literature of World War two and I'd always ask myself what would I do in a situation of occupation by the Nazis I think I have the courage to become a resistance fighter does it take courage I don't know and so when I met the people who ended up being the protagonist of my book I just I really wanted to follow that through and understand that more and and I have to admit when I was told of your book by your father and heard the title her father's an American hero by the way but in any event I'd assumed you were writing a book about the broader movement through the lens of on Sangsu Chi right the mythic figure of the democracy movement but this is really about as you already described sort of the grassroots movement and you tell the story largely through the lens of a character you call no way and and his community and his relationship to the to the environment why did you pick no way and what was it about him and his trajectory that that drove the narrative of your book I should probably say the whole book is in a way an exploration of who no way is and he's deliberately mysterious and he was very mysterious to me when I first met him I met him my second trip and I met him through an exile who I talked to a leader of exile a leading exile who had been a student activist and had fed the country and I said I want to talk to activists inside the country and the minute he was able to put me in touch with some I knew this was a larger web and I met one young man who invited a bunch of activists and in walks someone else 40 minutes late and he has this confidence that you don't see from everyone else there a lot of people talk to you sort of obliquely even if they were political activists in a very repressive environment they'd still talked around issues and they sort of sat to the side and looked like very physically you could just see that they were looking at you talking to you obliquely he sat right down in front of me 40 minutes late and just it's like that really annoying kid in class who sort of usurps every question and gets it right and and then I followed he asked me if I just wanted to hang out with him afterwards and meet more activists so I would meet him at night time in the usual place that was the address you would give me and I mangled it several times but we would always meet in these strange little back holes down in downtown Rangoon and I'd be talking to other activists and then he and then I went traveling and reporting around the country when I came back I tried to get in touch with him and someone else picked up his cell phone and I instantly knew that was that meant something was very wrong again in Burma where people don't really have cell phones and people are very very careful of what they say on the phone and he'd been chased out around as it turned out and then I met him on the way back when he'd sort of he'd been chased out by an intelligence agent so that that was my first meeting with this young man and he was and that story ended up writing for the Washington Post and I just thought well it's more than an 800 word story his story is I started to learn more about him and what he did and what he was up to he was just such a fascinating example to me of the kinds of contradictions in a person who ends up doing this kind of work and who has maybe it's courage maybe it's something else to pursue a life of complete self-sacrifice in which you have to give up the university education you can't fall in love for reasons that the book gets into and those are small things who maybe family members disappear into prison and terrible things happen that you don't want to admit and yet you go on and you pursue this life where you know that could happen to you just fascinating to me and then through him I saw that he was very very close he's very close to un-sanctioned she was under house arrest he would steal to her by night and and the world around him I sort of just got to know fantastic let's take it just a step back and in part of this is perhaps for those of us who weren't as expert on Burma to understand the nature of the authoritarian regime and the way that it implements repression the first thing I want to talk about is lexicon because it's something you grab you grapple with with the very title of your book right so the regime changing the very name of the country Burma to Myanmar Rangoon to Yangoon moving the the capital to the middle of the country even changing its own name right it's the Hunta known as slork which sounds like some Battlestar Galactica name so I don't even I can't remember the name the state peace and development council yes sounds very placid but can you explain before we get into the story of no way and how the community has evolved over time in the role of Anson Suu Kyi what is what did you see especially through Western eyes about the regime and how was it impacting the culture of the people the environment so the regime had been in place in the first military coup in Burma was in 1962 and this was ten years after the 12 years after after Burma achieved independence from from Britain and they had ten years of parliamentary democracy and then General Nehwin takes over the country in the name of holding together the country from secessionist movements all around the fringes and he impoverished the country's country that had been the shining promise of Southeast Asia it was not they had been repped by World War two I'm being historical but I think it gets us to where what happened in the end the country was very resource rich and under under General Nehwin he turned it into a one-party quasi-socialist state and started deeply impoverishing it by 1988 it took a small spark a tee shot brawl and also the demonization of people's currencies and savings for there to be a massive uprising huge uprising a year before the Berlin wall fell millions of people on the streets and someone was in the embassy there at the time happens to be the audience and and and the democracy movement that's written about here was came into being at that time and then there was a counter revolution with a new junta came into place the military didn't retreat to the barracks and and the the regime that they put in place was to get rid of the socialist one-party rule and supposedly impose a form of liberal market capitalism and it ended up being a form of crony capitalism and all ideology was gone and you had a military regime in place that had its hands in all elements of society the economy even co-opting religion so they didn't just have power over politics they had power over everything and controlled through fear and there were informers everywhere and spies down the block sort of roughly how they controlled and in terms of then how the community of activists and the democracy movement evolved you know you you talk in great detail in the book about obviously the imprisonment sort of the cycles of being in and out this the great stories that you tell of you know the way being chased by the security agents how did the repression and the nature of the regime impact the way that the democracy movement has evolved over time so the members of the democracy movement is to define them better I suppose it's quite broad it in 1988 there was this massive uprising and there was a call for general elections and from that the people that had been protesting on the streets more or less spontaneously came together and formed a political party the National League for Democracy which and Sanctuary is the head of or one of the three heads at the time the others were former military officers who defected and decided that they wanted to relinquish any association with the military that had been horribly warped under the previous regime and and how the community sort of evolved you know how they vote yes yeah so I'm sorry so I'll try to get to the other so the the um they evolved well first of all they won that election in a huge landslide 1990 the National League for Democracy despite the fact that the key leadership was already in prison and Sanctuary was already thrown under House arrest so if that movement that began then had the legitimacy of winning fair and square a democratic election very rare I don't think there's another country in the world that had a democracy movement with it a very clear win by a party and they were never able to take power so they had on the one hand a legal political party but then around that you had all the students who had risen up in 1988 who were variously thrown into prison and who sort of stayed in and out of prison and came in and out of prison for the next 20 years so you had people who were both trying to work within the parameters of a legal system that was entirely at the whimsy of the junta but trying to work within that system to get into power non-violently and then you had people all around that who were sort of working in what would traditionally be called an underground and clandestinely and initially thought street protests was the best way to maybe kick out the government and then found other ways of ways that seem very close to civil society teaching themselves about their rights going out and teaching people about their rights so they could stand up for themselves teaching people to help themselves Delfina are there one or two story you tell great stories in the book and incredibly well and I've got a couple of favorites but are there one or two stories or vignettes that stick out in your mind that are important to sort of understanding the character of no way or the movement itself to the audience that may not have read your book yet and by the way the book is on sale and Delfina is offered to please buy the book I love to say something from the very end although it sort of gives it away and the subhead of the book is a tale of defiance and deliverance and as we all know it's actually not giving the ending away farmers kind of opened up a bit in the last couple of years there's been a lot more space for these dissidents to become politicians as opposed to revolutionary so that the the two main protagonists end up in the last chapter of the book contesting in a by-election and one of them becomes a member of right well he's running for parliament and I was with them when they were campaigning so they're out me open talking about what they want to bring the country towards a democracy rule of law changing the Constitution and I was with them as they had to they one of them had been had not slept for 24 hours come from Rangoon it's no way he'd come from Rangoon and it was to deliver on Sang Si Chi's speech to the Union Election Commission in Naipido so we're in Naipido say which is this weird Pyongyang like capital that the junta built from scratch in the middle of the country in 2005 uprooting the abode of Kings the abode of Timmy's the abode of Kings or the city of Kings and monumental architecture and it looks nothing like the other cities in Burma and and and the other protagonist I called him Nigel his real name is Nigelin Nigel he was running for Candidacy in Parliament in one of the constituencies in Naipido so the two of them happened to be together because they're friends and they were Nigel and they hadn't slept one of them was preparing for and Sang Si Chi coming for a huge rally the next day and it's by now it's almost 11 30 at night and we were trying to go to see a final moment on the stage and suddenly there was an accident on the side of the road and we stopped and picked up these two people who were two casualties just randomly on the side of the highway and took him to a hospital this in the huge modern new capital and it turned out there was no doctor there no running water the two nurses who were there had no idea what they were doing and the the other person who was there representing the government was just interested in asking for names and addresses and names and completely symptomatic of the kind of bizarre perverse bureaucracy and complete lack of health care and social services that the junta had created and I just thought it was really significant of the kinds of struggle that they they claim to have been fighting for that they really implemented that in in their response which is just to stay there as late as they could through the night if need be to wait for a doctor to come along never mind about their campaign anymore so that was one thing that for me was pretty significant the other is right at the beginning of the book where noe is getting chased out of Brandon or he's just he's he's he's he doesn't know why he's leaving the NLD office and he sees an intelligence agent coming out from where the intelligence agents are seated in the heart opposite and the guy's clearly following him and he well first of all he does something very counterintuitive which is he well it's not what James Bond would do let's just say and then and then the minute he sort of gets on the bus to run away his first thought was for the women around him and and for me that was also pretty significant of who he is and the kinds of people they are which I don't mean to say they're heroes but there's a little goodness in them a lot of thought for really why they why they do what they do which is for their community yeah and I love the tale of the story of how the community in some ways buffers itself right the numbers and the use of humor and mocking to sort of deal with that sort of pressure I think that's pretty typical actually of situations like this I mean you get the what the the best humor in the most repressive places I think the gallows humor is a way of diffusing the pain the trauma there's no other way than just to laugh about it there's no time to sit and pick at your wounds because they're too busy having to power forward through new through new people getting arrested in the middle of the night new new tragedies every day and they just have to laugh about it don't mean there's a bit of romance around Burma in part because it's such a closed society and there's sort of the mythical dimensions of it there's also romance around the figure of Ansan Suchi called anti by the movement in a way what you know how important is she to where the movement was and currently how important is she and if I can add another question you know what what types of compromises does a movement like this have to make as it enters the political arena you know when they move as you tell in the story from dissidents to politicians what are the types of compromises that have to take place and hard decisions I'd say Ansan Suchi is extremely important I mean in this book for the fragment of time that I'm talking about which is really from 2009 to 2013 so the tail end of a 50-year struggle she was under house arrest until 2010 but she was she was always the guiding light even when she couldn't really talk but she did she found ways we were interlocked to her she's been I think she's one of the reasons that Burma gets any attention on it at all and they're the first to admit it other countries have very very nasty equally repressive regimes where they don't have an Ansan Suchi North Korea doesn't have an Ansan Suchi for other reasons obviously so to keep the attention on Burma she's important and within Burma everything she's ever said everything that she said when she's until recently and lack there all of what she hasn't said but when she would come out of house arrest any occasion occasion she had she would really tirelessly find ways to articulate people's aspirations and and diffuse their fear and she was also very good at laughing and when you see her and when you see her talking in front of people she just she's really relaxed and she just kind of it's like she just picked up she's just sitting down talking to her friends and and people flock to her they really do there was a lot of talk well I was starting to go there that the chatter of foreign analysts that she maybe wasn't even very relevant anymore because she'd been so cut off which was exactly the junters intent they kept her under house arrest not in prison so that she would be cut off even from her own people so that's what she's been very important but then the question of the compromise of what they had to make again related to her so in 2012 the little by election that the NLD contested wasn't a huge election it was for only 48 seats initially in a parliament of about 14 problems about over a thousand seats a tiny tiny tiny and the NLD decided to contest this was the first election they contested since 1990 and they won again in a landslide and underestimating even their own power and and so since then they've been in Parliament those those candidates and and then other of the activists who'd been on the ground have been a little bit more vocal and I think the compromises that all of a sudden I mean it's the old thing about the poetry of evolution and the prose of government I think they still they still very much hold to their principle of what they stand for the big question of democracy and freedom and what is that and the Constitution under which they're there they are there in Parliament and under which they have to legislate is deeply flawed and has real issues and they know that but they're they're working within that system to be able to to to bring about change and the biggest compromise you seen on this is that I'm saying she hasn't spoken out more forcefully for our ears and on behalf of the Rohingya people in Burma and the Muslims writ large who will be see been suffering or in the past since 2012 been suffering massive communal violence she hasn't really come out and really explicitly in the way that she used to very explicitly talk about the abuses that were going on and I think that's I mean it seems very very clear that that's because she knows that she's within a very tight situation and the NLD party itself hasn't come out more explicitly and said this is wrong these people should we've been fighting for rights for everyone in the country it's not just for the Buddhists it's for the Muslims as well who've been with us for generations and part of the reason for that people say all the times because they want to win the next elections I think it's also because they understand that to to to ruffle the feathers of the military who still hold all the power is really possibly to set them back to where they were they remember their history they don't they they remember that they won in a landslide in 1990 and the result was they were all thrown in jail and the the results were completely neglected for 90 years so I mean 20 years but in terms of the regime itself we've obviously had the opening relaxing relaxing of the sanctions where would you say sort of politically the regime is now you know Washington Post came out recently with an editorial sort of very critical of where the regime is on human rights for some of the reasons you've already described a lot of debate as to whether or not sanctions were effective or not whether or not they should be maintained until there's further progress politically in terms of human rights what's your assessment of kind of where the regime is in terms of its opening to the rest of the world yeah it's clear that economically the country has changed since since those elections well 2012 since elections in 2010 and then 2011 I should just briefly say the gender dissolved itself and a cozy parliamentary system came into place not cozy a parliamentary system a cozy civilian government under a new constitution that the junta more or less wrote over 14 years and and as and as a result of that we've seen change in Burma because all of a sudden it's not a junta that's just issuing orders anymore now you have a real parliament although how that came into being and who's in it and the military reserves 25 block of seats 25 percent block of seats and 60 percent of the military back party you know we had boycotted but nonetheless there have been reforms since then and the new government that came into place ease censorship released a huge amount of political prisoners and the most iconic ones who've since been out and now it seems of course that the reforms have have stalled and I think my sense is really adopting the sense of what the protagonist here would think which there are no surprises to them it's not that the reforms have stalled or regressed they've gone as far as they kind of were intended to go in the first place this was a top managed transition as it were that was written by the military and it's happening exactly as they said it would they wrote their own constitution the constitution is functioning exactly as it's written which is just recently there was a vote to allow and thanks you cheat to be president which involved changing a clause in the constitution that was deliberately written to prevent her from being president which prevents anyone who has a spouse who's foreign or children who are foreign from being president or vice president and there was an effort to amend that clause and another clause which was significantly written in to prevent the military losing power which is that more than 75% have to vote in favor only men to the constitution which is impossible because the 25% block of seats that have been allotted to the military ensures that they all vote as a block and they did and they voted it down and so the constitutional question is kind of stalled the military retains power but through a parliamentary system but beyond that I mean there really has been significant change in so far as people are a lot less afraid to talk openly to protest openly and you read about this all the time just the other day there were garment workers protesting for minimum wage I would have been doing that for a while people in a goldmine protesting land grabs students who are always protesting and always getting chucked in jail but they're protesting every day it's really significant in a country where this is impossible before and journalists are being more vocal but a lot of change in that sense so what happens going forward the 2015 elections in less than six months now November 8th that's sort of anyone's guess anyone the presumption is that the NLD will win a majority and and then we'll continue to push for constitutional change but in the interim they can speak open and they can speak openly in parliament where they couldn't and they can push forward change economically the country has changed and so it's opening and it sits of course not in total isolation it sits between China and India and as Lee Kuan Yew reminded Burma they probably need you the US to counterbalance the influence of China for those of us who sort of pretend to sort of be students of balance of power and great power politics where does Burma sit in your mind in the context of these other geopolitical forces at play the rise of China competition with India the question of the US in Asia yeah what's your sense of that well part of the reason that the junta changed itself and dissolved itself was the whole question of China which is very fraught in Burma there's a very complex relationship with China but the Chinese the China had become the biggest sponsor of the junta and the biggest trade partner and the biggest supplier of military weaponry and and and also the biggest the country that was relying on Burmese resources on hydropower and oil and gas and there was a fear that was just too much influence from China and just say China's that Burma situated on the map but China's has a huge frontier with Burma as does India and Thailand and Laos and Bangladesh so so on the one hand there was a fear that China was becoming much much too influential and India had been trying to push against that by also having better and better relations with the junta and meanwhile the US it might even have been someone in this room who taught me that the US treated Burma's as a bootie issue didn't really necessarily have any economic issues in Burma and so could have the luxury of its principles for a long time but at the same time respect the human rights movement there and and the 1990 elections and just have nothing to do economically with Burma but of course with the American pivot to Asia and the fears of China's rise Burma's been a very important crossroads for the China India and ASEAN connection and as China was moving into Burma and through Burma getting a mouth to the Andaman Sea and building deep seaports I think there was concern in Washington it wasn't the only reason and again Ambassador Dinger I'm sure you can speak more to this there was concern in Washington that China might be getting Burma much too much into its sphere of influence that's certainly not the only reason that policy under the Obama administration shifted which was prior to President Obama the policy on Burma had been effectively to not talk to the junta or to freeze off Burma as a prior and then the Obama administration decided to have more engagement with the junta that the sanctions regime by itself clearly had been a real result to it the country was still very stagnant one last question selfishly I could ask you like a thousand more but do you still keep in touch with Newey yeah although it yes what's going on with Newey yeah I do um the pick ends a bit of ambiguity deliberately and his life I think will be ambiguous his what's happened to him now I mean it's not giving too much away to say it through the course of the book he becomes a real political strategist I mean he sort of grew up but at the same time he was already he'd already been an activism and a dissident for about ten ten years at the beginning of the book and he's continuing to do what he was trying to do which was build an underground why it's not so much with semi-underground still something everything is still semi-underground there because they don't know what's gonna happen he he he wants to educate their I say they're dissidents they're educators really they try to educate their people about their rights so he's still doing that he's he still has his own network that sort of is trying to educate that's loosely affiliated to the NLD party and I think he's still very he's still very very involved in what the NLD is doing he's still a kind of backdoor strategist for them but he likes to be behind the scenes probably the reason I kept his name so you don't know he's very recognizable to people in Burma I didn't change anything else about his life but by keeping his name or which he asked me initially it was kind of actually his way of saying please don't because I don't want to be seen as a I don't want to know that celebrity I don't want to get that heroism that it would make it would actually be very bad for his reputation as it were it would seem like he thought he was too big and he's very modest I mean they're all very modest about their role in the movement they're the first to say auntie and thanks who she is the one but we're nothing we're nothing we're nothing I'm nothing don't write about me write about her write about him so he's still very involved I mean he's a lifelong his vocation is to be fighting for his country his ego he has an ego big ego but it he suppresses it in the name of I mean in terms of what he can do for himself his conventional life is impossible you can't lead a conventional life doing what they do at least at that point in time fascinating well let me open it up to all of you and I'm going to reserve the the moderators prerogative of one last question at the end but let's now open up to questions we have microphones so raise your hand ask you to identify yourself and ask a question yes ma'am hello I'm Robin White retired fire and service I'm curious about how you managed to get around how you managed to meet with all these people but the junta thought about you were you followed and just how did you do this when someone must have known you were talking to all these people it's good question I sort of had to be very old school journalist I think in this age of digital journalism where you can go in with all kinds of equipment satellite phones and use the internet when I first went into Burma I'd be very very careful that I didn't give away that I was a journalist because the minute they found out people were journalists they instantly deport them BBC journalist was recognized immediately from March back onto a plane and someone went to the NLD headquarters of Korean journalist snapped a photo and they immediately knew she was a journalist so I I went in and but at the same time there were very few foreigners when I first went into Burma the only people that were there were aid workers and they were very clearly there as aid workers so it seemed really illogical that they would even know that I was there as I said I was a tourist and I falsified my my my occupation my history on the visa form and I blame that on the editors of the Washington post I said what should I do they said lie sorry I did which they never say you know the watching of those never lied ever it's a benign indictment of yeah ever never really never I mean that was what was so surprising I mean watching the posters on a few places that will never even allow its writers to use a pseudonym unless that's changed I'm not mistaken so I lied and I've never think I go back I don't remember what my first lie was but so I went as a tourist and I am and at the same time I couldn't contact I had very I had two contacts one was a German man who wrote to me yesterday who's um who runs a human or humanitarian organization and the other was a Burmese doctor and I couldn't write to him he had email access but I couldn't tell him hi I'm with the Washington Post a email because I understood everything was monitored and it was so he met me at my hotel and I was really lucky because he he he I could tell him instantly and he sort of took me around in his really broken down car which is very typical and I started meeting people through him and but then he told me later on because it was a time we sort of dashed into a side there's so many stories around this I'm not really answering fully but he we dashed into a restaurant one day and he said we're being followed I said really where I didn't you know and I because and I the advice I'd been given before I went into Burma it was the first real foreign correspondence I'd done from very very seasoned foreign correspondents of the post half of whom had Pulitzer's they all said to me oh you'll rely on your instinct going you know and but at the same time you won't have instinct when you're there you know when you first get there because you're you you don't you haven't developed it yet for this country so I had to rely on people like this doctor and and then he later told me you know at first I was really worried that you're a Washington Post reporter and I was helping you out and but actually you just come off as a curious tourist so it's okay so I used that I really used that when he told me that I used that kind of and then I and they underestimated me I think the authorities because I'm female and young and young and I think their their perception is nice thing they they assume that the Western journalists from big papers and other places like that are men they look a certain way and but I and I was just really careful I never used drivers or the same drivers I hid my stuff I hid my notebooks I was I was paranoid and my computer I had small computer the Washington Post had given me a computer and it said the Washington Post as a scrolls they had to wipe that from but but then when I would go back I do the same thing I mean it was always a question and when I was leaving the country I was very worried because of my notebooks I had obscure ways of writing people's names I'm naturally disorganized but I got doubly disorganized but I kind of had my own disorganization and I rip up everything that was significant and try and hide everything else I'm not a rip up anything that's significant just rip up anything I didn't need that would give away people's addresses and and then I would I would hide everything else and just hope that I wouldn't get stopped and then I couldn't get back into the country for quite a while and I had appointments to meet and sang si chi and I figured it was because I I had risen to the attention of the government but then I found out I was on the gray list and I got back in anyway yeah but there was a period where they didn't allow you yeah there was a in two different countries and again I used my mother as an alibi sorry mommy she couldn't get back in but um yeah they knew that I was um or I don't know they my apparently my passport was referred to the foreign ministry in Napidore I was really worried I found a lot of people I said but I've never used a byline I've never I've been really careful like pinball after sensitive interviews I didn't go to the NLD office but I think it was just a question of again typical of the way that the military junta regime system worked they could just arbitrarily do things with no real explanation but then no real follow-through either I think if they they was I made a mistake when I tried to get a visa the time that I was first denied it in Bangkok I tried to I was I was good I came out of the country when my visa was expired because I had overstayed my visa a couple of times but I went to get a new visa within a week because I didn't point with Ansan Sichi and I didn't want to muck around with that I wanted to make sure that I was legitimate when I was there with a visa and they knew that well hang on why are you getting a visa a week later something's not right so they still anyway so I just had to get around the system in bizarre ways and it was always winging it yeah great question yes sir yes the finuita douche Carnegie and I'm a remarkable story my question is could this have happened the opening up could it have happened like 20 years ago before the age of the internet I'm just trying to understand whether what we always say or many people say that you know globalization and the internet and the social media etc are playing a very important role in in these popular movements democratization around the world do you do you agree with that in the case of of Myanmar Burma yeah I think in the case of the generation that I'm although I'm talking about older people too in this book but there's but the the young protagonist of this book really use the internet a lot even though it was highly highly censored in Burma and a very very poor country where only I think there were 300,000 users within the internet in the cities but nowhere else and this is a country about well now they've discovered about 51 million really small numbers and and the electricity cut out I think it's easy well first of all I should say I think it's it's easy to be too utopian about the power of the internet in a country like this there's no such I mean Twitter is really used by people on the outside of the country was then not really relevant to getting people to stand out in the streets face the barrel of a gun have their photos taken by plainclothes officer and have that match to take to do that physically take something else then communicating through internet but the internet became very very helpful for young people particularly who started to know how to use it to somehow get around the sensors and get information from the outside world and information about themselves before this they were learned they were reliant entirely on the radio so 20 years ago in 1990 or 1988 when they had a massive uprising they've had nothing since like that and it's a shame because I think they won't they if maybe if there had been news and internet at the time it might have turned into something else but the only way that they were able and they're on the biggest day of the uprising August 8th 1988 which goes down and infamy for them they call that the whole 1988 the movement of 48 because August 8th 1988 someone called for that protest through the radio and there was only one radio station at the time really that they were listening to the BBC and everyone heard and everyone poured into the street but beyond that what they could do with that was not much whereas now they have access instantly so yeah the information age allows them to understand what's going on but in terms of the actual political changes that have happened I don't know that they're so related to that to the internet but it's very difficult to say that a country that had been hermetic can remain hermetic and closed and xenophobic in the way that it then it did in the past the borders have been very porous for years and it it means that there has been an interaction and a desire to open up that they just they can't hold back anymore even from the higher level yes up here hi thank you so much my name is Brianna and I'm currently an intern in the Office of East Asian Affairs at USAID and I actually studied music as an expression of dissent in Burma during my undergrad so I'm really interested in the creative ways you talk about that people would have to sit during the time period but my question reflects more on the current ethnic violence that we're seeing in Burma and particularly in relation to the NLD party what is the sentiment within the party regarding the violence even though they aren't openly speaking out about it and do you feel that their silence weakens their legitimacy as a party advocating for democracy that's a really good question well the NLD it's difficult to speak of them as a block because there are many many different people within the NLD including the young man of Ness and their Muslims are in the NLD and then there's Ansan Suchi who's the head of the party as a party themselves they've been tempered in what they've said but they still stand up for the rights of everyone in the country including Muslims but the thing I'd say about the NLD is they've been in a position of minority in the government they know this so they're still they're still fighting to have more power to be able to speak out and to implement the kinds of actions that a government should take I think it's easy to focus on them and blame them for not doing more with regard to the communal violence there's not that much they can do other than but they should I agree with you from the outside in Western perspective it delegitimizes them if they don't come out and say in this instance the sort of ultra nationalist movement led by a Buddhist monk and various others they're wrong they don't speak in the name of the Buddhist people they don't speak in the name of what Burma should be and I've not unless I'm mistaken I'm not seeing them say that anywhere I haven't been back to Burma quite well but nonetheless like yeah they sort of but but I think beyond that no I just I'll leave it unless you know there's more that you want to say. Other questions? Mr. Ambassador I hate to put you on the spot would you want to comment on anything either currently or otherwise bring it a mic for the ambassador. Thanks very much for the the presentation and for writing the book the embassy in Rangoon the American Embassy and others as well have attempted to foster the the civil society instincts in the people there and I think I haven't yet read the book but I gather you captured it very well that that these instincts have always been there and and it was important to to develop them to the extent it was it could be done in the repressive environment that was there at the time. One of the things that I think has has facilitated the the transition that's taken place so far relates to the American Center I don't know if you ever got the chance to go there. Yeah definitely I met a lot of activists there. Okay yeah I mean there it's quite an amazing place and it's set up by the US Information Service and and we did an election a US election event there in 2008 both for the election and for the inaugural address and in both cases overflow crowds and absolutely interested in what a free and fair election could look like and when President Obama in his inaugural speech mentioned that if you'll unclench your fists you repressive regimes in the world if you'll unclench your fists we'll extend our hand that resonated incredibly in the audience at the American Center I think it also resonated to an extent in Napida. As you suggested they had their own reasons for wanting to move into a transition of some sort but that offer I think contributed to it as well. And I would say the American Center just to pull up on that the American Center was incredibly important as far as I could tell I mean I'm not just saying that as I haven't been watching from here from from what I could gather and they're really I think this is one of the few countries in the world not been to North Korea which I think is even worse but I think they're really very very few countries in the world that had this kind of repressive regime on so many levels and spies over the shoulder people really afraid to speak anywhere openly but the American Center and the British Embassy's cultural wing particularly American Center were very very important for people to be able to come and learn about democracy and a lot of the activists who came out of prison really relied on it and there were a lot of informants there too as I understand but it was amazing the first time I went there and I saw the list of of books that people were requesting and they would ask for things like please get us Farid Zacharias what was that wonderful bookkeeper on the Liberals and Thomas Payne Common Sense and books that were censored that they could never get a hold of but they knew and they wanted that and the American Center allowed them to have that yes let's wait for Mike that's what folks can hear Micrositic PBS online news hour I was just there in February and I was somewhat distressed to see all the other embassies are right in the center of the city including the British Cultural Center that you mentioned the American Embassy has been moved way out to the suburbs and it's not accessible I guess maybe you get there by bus or something and like all the other embassies because of security there's all these walls and barbed wire and everything and I'm just wondering in those circumstances do the local people feel welcome and do they go to is there a library that they can go to or is this yet just another security compound that houses American diplomats should let the ambassador answer but I will say that the new embassies three doors down from unsung she's villa which is a major center of so that she's not that it yeah it's out of the downtown downtown but at the same time it's her villa is a major focus point of communal action yeah and it's literally it's on the same road it's University Avenue but and the American Center isn't a different it's a different location it's in a different location so yeah and I don't know that people really come to the embassies that much but that's yeah so it's accessible and Brangoon is huge so it's well relatively yes ma'am my name is Marilyn Myers I'm also retired Foreign Service and I was sure Jay and Rangoon in the mid 90s for two years to pick up on the American Center USIS when you're when you're putting out publicity you always want to know who your target audiences are I mean who's coming who's responding and what the center was doing then had a huge satellite dish and what was pulling down every day what was then known as the McNeil lair news hour so this shows how far back we're going little nod to the and and they would and in the center was showing this and all these people would come in in their longevity etc etc and watch and then go away I mean young people older people across the board folks and so I said to the center director at one point Doug Barnes I said Doug who's coming who's your target audiences where's your list of who's showing up and he looked at me and he said Marilyn I don't keep a list if I keep a list somebody's going to come looking for the list and I said you're absolutely right so he was right on on that but we really were pulling in people and they appreciated what they were able to see I think one more question up front here all right we'll do two we'll do two if nothing that's okay with you my name is Louie and voice of America but my service for my activists as well welcome I haven't read your book but I guess that you have talked to or met with a lot of activists and our politicians alike in Burma so it's kind of a general question that what do you think that are what all those including well all those young activists what do they want from America from America well for one thing they really look to America is it sounds such like such a platitude but it's the freedom in America represents really genuinely I'm French an American by nationality and I say that because I've gone into Burma a lot on my French passport because it was easier it was less suspicious to authorities here maybe but when I tell people there I'm French and for me France is like America stands for freedom they say oh Zidane the football player you know Zidane when you say America freedom you know they say really so what they want from America again I think Ambassador Dinger can answer this too but I I think they want the the idea that America represents not to you not to have the same idea of freedom in Burma I try to get into this in the book a little bit that the idea of freedom in Burma is slightly different culturally specific to Buddhism and ideas about that very expansive more expansive maybe but but the idea of a democracy that's functioning a system of I mean it depends on the person some people would look to some one dissident there to get into it looked at sort of the Madisonian model and maybe they could impose that and ideas about democracy from America but I think also to have actually American businesses now as I understand as I've seen people really welcome it I mean a sanctions question was very very controversial within Burma as it is in any other country about whether it worked whether it didn't was it the lever of influence that made the junta want to open up I think that's an open question still they really did want sanctions lifted because I know on the military side pretty honest to this I always heard that the generals and their families were on the SDN sanctions list they can't get into the country targeted sanctioned list and they wanted to be off it so they could travel to America but also they weren't happy to be trading with other Asian countries they wanted to be able to not just with other Asian countries only be trading with America so there's a relations with America's also what they want I there are many answers to that I think but you got a better answer than me on that what people wanted from America it's a great answer back there last question from the audience thank you Jack Mint with the International Republican Institute I have a question regarding the future of press media in Myanmar see we with freedom of press in Myanmar we also see a rise of news medias that don't necessarily report in accordance with truth or journalistic integrity for that matter especially online news outlets some of them going so far as to you know inciting hate speech and and contributing to the as we see in the Rakhine State riots back in 2012 so as a journalist yourself where do you see this headed in the long run and what do you think could be the best approach at tackling this we want to prescribe policy and I've heard it from journalists in bomb well first of all start by saying that Burma had the some of the toughest censorship rules on journalism in the world and they had a press scrutiny board and everything that was ever printed had to be submitted and that was a bullish in the last couple years but throughout that time you still had journalists who were trying and who had about there about 50 to 100 weekly monthly journals really first-tiered journalist some of them who had studied abroad and found ways to come back and they couldn't really do real journalism they had to find metaphorical ways to discuss what was going on so I'd say there was a there's a vanguard in Burma real journalists who really know and who really studied and who taught others and real journalists sounds like it's elite profession but um who understand the standards and I think it's just now that there's a lot less censorship this is a situation that even countries like America face where suddenly anyone can talk online and give their thoughts and you often get the fella in the pajama in the middle of the country who can be anonymous and say something really vitriolic and that's a real problem certainly in Burma where that's going now I think the government hasn't been able to really clamp down and figure out how to deal with hate speech and they've kind of avoided the topic and won't touch the topic till after the elections and it's certainly a huge problem because the hate speech as you say has incited a lot of visceral hatred towards the Rakhine to the Rohingya and the Muslims one hopes that it'll be tempered and that they'll find a nice balance I don't I don't know that that's the case that it kind of goes together with the whole political reform in Burma that's going to keep going forward or if it's sort of about where it'll be but I think the journalists that are out there in Burma that are already doing work every day are really pushing forward and they're testing the limits of this of what they can talk about they're writing about corruption they're writing about the ethnic insurgencies even if they're getting thrown in jail and then and then they write about that if they're getting thrown in jail and that opens up more opportunities for the media. Delphine will you go back to Burma can you go back to Burma and what's next for you what's what's on the horizon in terms of projects and work? I definitely want to go back to Burma and I think certainly for the elections I feel a bit silly talking about what's going to happen in Burma that actually being there very recently so definitely if I manage to get a visa but things have changed now and people who US the head of the US campaign for Burma was in Burma very recently and he would never have been allowed so I'm sure I'll hope to be able to get back in. A book tour in Burma? I don't know about a book tour but yeah I mean it'd be nice to be able to bring this and see if people tell me if I'm right and if they appreciate this that'd be great and then beyond that I don't know I think it's Burma is a difficult place to let go of it everyone I ever know who's ever been there for whatever reason there's a luxury tourist or like me as a journalist or an aid worker just comes out of there completely in love with the country it's just heartbreakingly beautiful and its history is so tragic but and the people are so warm it's just I'll never let go but I'll write about other things I hope. Wonderful. Well this has been fantastic I mean we could go on for for hours congratulations on a great book wonderful sort of body of experience and work that you've portrayed I hope the rebel of Rangoon makes its way to the American Center to the library and I hope all of you here as well as those watching buy a copy and buy copies for your friends and family it's a great read and incredible work so thank you Duffy. Thank you. Join me in thanking Duffy.